Writers are taught not to write wish-fulfillment—it’s too easy, boring, or low stakes. But that reasoning is wrong. It only seems that way because we’ve all already read thousands of wish-fulfillment stories about cis het able-bodied white males, so they’re very… predictable.
For every other demographic?
Readers actively, desperately crave wish-fulfillment stories about themselves, because they rarely if ever see them. What’s more, those stories feel fresh & original, even to people outside the target demo, just because they’re seen so infrequently.
So, if you want to write wish-fulfillment stories, go right ahead. Write them to your heart’s content. Just follow all the usual rules you would for making your own stories good.
This revelation brought to you by the time I explained the problem with wish-fulfillment on a panel at Rainfurrest, pulling things off the top of my head—
“uh, a unicorn… with a kitten… on a rocket to the moon…”
—and found myself staring at a room eager to read that story.